[ad_1]
BERLIN (AP) – The Green candidate for the successor to Chancellor Angela Merkel has admitted to having made a mistake in a hatch about allegations that she had copied from others in a new book and said it would have been better to have one List of sources to use.
The claims that surfaced last week have caused serious turmoil for Annalena Baerbock’s campaign, the latest in a series of problems to get environmentalists to win the first bid for Germany’s top spot in the September 26 elections.
Last week, Austrian media scholar Stefan Weber said that some phrases in Baerbock’s book entitled “Jetzt. How We Will Renew our Land, â€published June 21, excerpts from other publications were strikingly similar. A steady drop of new claims of copied passages followed.
Baerbock’s party described the allegations as an “attempt at character assassination”. Baerbock himself declined to speak of copyright infringement last week, but said many other ideas were incorporated into the work.
Some federal cabinet ministers and others have resigned their doctoral theses following allegations of plagiarism in recent years, but Baerbock’s book did not meet these scientific standards and did not include footnotes.
In comments on Thursday’s edition of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Baerbock said she had relied on publicly available sources, “but I take the criticism seriously.”
“In retrospect, it would certainly have been better if I had worked with a source list,” she added.
The Greens led many polls after Baerbock, 40, was nominated in April. However, the latest polls show that Merkel’s center-right Union bloc led by Armin Laschet is up to eleven points ahead.
Green missteps include a poorly presented plan to increase gasoline prices and talk of stopping short-haul flights, which they really don’t want to ban. Baerbock herself has undergone extensive scrutiny – she had to correct details on a résumé and declare belated payments from her party to parliamentary authorities, which she says she did not immediately know needed to be reported.
Baerbock said she and the Greens had worked hard to overcome traditional political divisions, but admitted the approach would be tested in a tough election campaign – “I also slipped into old trenches for a moment.”
Copyright © 2021. All rights reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.
[ad_2]
